Albany was her starting point

HBO movie highlights Times Union reporter who became respected war correspondent

Published 8:01 pm, Sunday, May 27, 2012

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Nicole Kidman, left, and Clive Owen are shown in a scene from the HBO film, "Hemingway & Gellhorn." The film, about the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, premieres May 28, 2012 at 9p.m. on HBO. (AP Photo/HBO)

Nicole Kidman, left, and Clive Owen are shown in a scene from the HBO film, "Hemingway & Gellhorn." The film, about the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, premieres May 28, 2012 at

Nicole Kidman, left, and Clive Owen are shown in a scene from the HBO film, "Hemingway & Gellhorn." The film, about the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, premieres May 28, 2012 at 9p.m. on HBO. (AP Photo/HBO) less

Nicole Kidman, left, and Clive Owen are shown in a scene from the HBO film, "Hemingway & Gellhorn." The film, about the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, premieres May 28, 2012 at 9p.m. ... more

She was 21 years old in 1929 when she joined the staff of the paper on Beaver Street, along Newspaper Row downtown, shortly after dropping out of Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia in her junior year to pursue a career in journalism.

As the lone female reporter on the Times Union staff, she repeatedly had to fend off unwanted advances by the city editor, who had a propensity to drink too much, according to Caroline Moorehead's biography, "Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life."

Through letters, reminiscences and a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, "What Mad Pursuit," published in 1934 with a reporter protagonist named Charis Day, Gellhorn described a boozy, raucous era of newspapering in Albany.

She was born in St. Louis and grew up there in upper-class comfort, the daughter of a suffragette mother and a father who was a prosperous physician. She was hired at the Times Union to cover women's club stories, as well as to visit the city morgue and write short police blotter items.

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But Gellhorn, peppered with whistles and catcalls as she made her rounds of the city, longed for more ambitious assignments and began to chafe at her cub reporter role, according to Moorehead. She wanted to right injustices and to take up the cause of women's rights. She wrote a longer story about a woman who lost custody of her only child to her husband because the woman smoked, worked as a waitress and liked to play bridge.

Gellhorn wanted to do a follow-up story on inequality in custody cases, but her city editor rebuffed the idea and told her to return to writing cop briefs and society news.

Gellhorn seethed.

Disappointed and unhappy, she left the Times Union after six months, with the blessing of her family and friends who turned up their noses and treated her Albany stint as if she were slumming.

Gellhorn was swayed by a family friend who said that she was wasting her time in the backwater of Albany "hobnobbing with odd persons who wore loud checked suits," according to Moorehead.

After quitting the paper, she freelanced and wrote a few pieces for the New Republic, as well as a story for the Holland America publication and paid for a one-way ticket to France in 1930. Her dream was to become a foreign correspondent and she quickly realized it by getting hired by the United Press bureau in Paris.

Gellhorn first crossed paths with Hemingway during a 1936 family trip over the Christmas holiday to Key West, Florida. They later hooked up in Spain while both covered the Spanish Civil War — Gellhorn writing for Collier's Weekly. She became widely regarded as the greatest female war correspondent of mid-century.

She was known for a sassy wit, an iron will, a splendid prose style and a willowy allure — all of which Hemingway apparently found irresistible. They married in 1940 and their tumultuous union, a clash of outsized egos, ended in divorce in 1945.